This engrossing anthology assembles classic New Yorker pieces from a
complex era enshrined in the popular imagination as the decade of poodle
skirts and Cold War paranoia--featuring contributions from Philip Roth,
John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, and Adrienne Rich, along with fresh
analysis of the 1950s by some of today's finest writers.
The New Yorker was there in real time, chronicling the tensions and
innovations that lay beneath the era's placid surface. In this thrilling
volume, classic works of reportage, criticism, and fiction are
complemented by new contributions from the magazine's present all-star
lineup of writers. The magazine's commitment to overseas reporting
flourished in the 1950s, leading to important dispatches from East
Berlin, the Gaza Strip, and Cuba during the rise of Castro. Closer to
home, the fight to break barriers and establish a new American identity
led to both illuminating coverage, as in a portrait of Thurgood Marshall
at an NAACP meeting in Atlanta, and trenchant commentary, as in E. B.
White's blistering critique of Senator Joe McCarthy. The arts scene is
recalled in critical writing rarely reprinted, including Wolcott Gibbs
on My Fair Lady, Anthony West on Invisible Man, and Philip Hamburger
on Candid Camera. Also featured are great early works from Philip Roth
and Nadine Gordimer, as well as startling poems by Theodore Roethke and
Anne Sexton, among others. Completing the panoply are insightful and
entertaining new pieces by present-day New Yorker contributors
examining the 1950s through contemporary eyes. The result is a vital
portrait of American culture as only one magazine in the world could do
it.
Including contributions by Elizabeth Bishop - Truman Capote - John
Cheever - Roald Dahl - Janet Flanner - Nadine Gordimer - A. J.
Liebling - Dwight Macdonald - Joseph Mitchell - Marianne Moore -
Vladimir Nabokov - Sylvia Plath - V. S. Pritchett - Adrienne Rich -
Lillian Ross - Philip Roth - Anne Sexton - James Thurber - John Updike -
Eudora Welty - E. B. White - Edmund Wilson
And featuring new perspectives by Jonathan Franzen - Malcolm
Gladwell - Adam Gopnik - Elizabeth Kolbert - Jill Lepore - Rebecca
Mead - Paul Muldoon - Evan Osnos - David Remnick
Praise for The 50s
"Superb: a gift that keeps on giving."--Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
**
"[A] magnificent anthology."--Literary Review**
